Sound Factory

In this charming little game, you play the role of a bored tire manufacturing worker named Dink. Dink's tired of his pathetic day to day existence doing the same old thing. In fact, he'd quit his job were it not for his eight starving children and warehouse load of credit card debt. Today though, things are going to turn around for poor Dink as he discovers his inborn talent to make music from old factory machinery.

I have a really dumpy computer and flash games usually lag and play really slow on it, even with them set to low quality. So, often, whenever there's a game with a timer, the timer will run at normal speed while the graphics and controls all are lagged way down. So, when I even attempt to play this game, I have to either finish my quota and not unlock anything past the chord, or forget the quota - virtually impossible for me to do this, although it seems pretty fun.

Hey benetnash, I know exactly what you mean about not getting enough time!

Whenever I make Flash games, I'm always torn on this topic. Basically the developer has 2 choices: create a time based counter (it's actually based off of a clock somewhere), or use a frame based counter. A frame based counter says that, for example, you have 1500 frames to complete your task.

The second one solves your problem if developers choose to use it because all if your computer is slow, it'll give you more time. On the other hand, in a way it's like cheating, especially if high score boards are involved. You get more time than other players to maneuver around asteroids or turn off instruments or whatever.

The game doesn't seem to load for me.. when I click on the link it takes me to the mTV site.. where I can hit play game. It then opens another window that I can not resize and that is blank except for the mTV stuff to the left and on top :(

Has anyone had any luck running this on a Mac?
MTV's site doesn't seem very Safari friendly (the Play button for the game doesn't show up!) and once you hit Play on FireFox it just sits there.
Or is it just me?
Flash is all up to date.

Looks fun but I can't play it. I have Flash player version 9 installed and no problem with the other games. But this game just won't work for me. Just hangs there or something, I don't see it and I can't play it. Sucks.

early morning it also worked for me fine. now everything is messed up with ads and videoclips.
But you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to scroll thepage, so the game fits into the window. Maybe you have to leftclick somwhere in the black area before.

Try this link, it bypasses all MTV's corrupt mess:
(you'll have to bolt these three lines together):http://www.mtv.com/content/games/arcade/
assets/sound_factory/SoundFactory.swf?
scripturl=xmlStore.jhtml

Thanks, John. I've updated the javascript pop-up above to point to the link you gave.

The CGI scripts that post comments are overloaded at this time of day, which is why the delay in response. I'm working on upgrading the servers very soon, which should address that problem. Thanks for your patience. In the meantime, I will clean up the duplicate posts. =)

My biggest problem with this game (which is alluded to in the review) is that the timing is all off - at least on my slow work computer. I'll have to try it again at home. It's hard to write a masterpiece when the workers and machines can't keep a straight beat. The timing wasn't an issue in "A Break In The Road" - everything always seems to be in-sync in that (AWESOME) game.

Another problem I had with this one was that it allowed you to compose stuff that was out of key. While that wouldn't be a problem for people who know some music theory, if you're just mashing buttons it can sound like a cacophony and the workers will still like it.

A Break in The Road had all the melodic samples in the same key, so it always sounded like you know what you're doing. The ability to write some melody lines in Sound Factory is pretty fun though.

Someone yesterday said that A Break in The Road could use some extra "combo" type scoring. I wholeheartedly agree. Tony Hawk-style scoring, about another 100 (unlock-able) samples and online competition (where the other players rate your work) and "A Break in The Road" would be the next big thing.

I think it's because MTV Overdrive isn't made to work on macs (it lets you know if you try to access Overdrive the normal way).
...stupid MTV...in my house...not playing good music...(stealin my pokemon)..

I see this game shows (25 comments) on the home page. But only 3 are showing when you click to read all of them. I guess your not going to display my negative comment and the other 21 negative comments either. If it's bad, just admit it and take it down.

Excuse me, Clint, and with all due respect, you should read the commentsabove before adding any nasty remarks. You would have discovered that the game was indeed tested ahead of time and it was working fine when we reviewed and posted the game.

And FYI, I just received this from the good folks at MTV Games:

"Thanks for letting us know about this -- mtv.com is actually going through a re-launch right now, so we're continually working on a bunch of fixes -- looking into this right now."

Has anyone figured out how to share tunes. I can get to my library, and send email so I get a link, but the link doesn't work, it either gets stuck on a MTV loading screen (with Opera), or just redirects to MTVs game pages on the Sound Factory (IE & Firefox).

OH MY GOD, the MTV game site is so so so badly coded and designed. Yes, I have Flash 9.
If the website isn't crashing or loading a blank section and is sort of actually working, it keeps showing these stupid instrusive videos and adverts all the time with weird pauses that you can't click past. 3 times I tried clicking on the Sound Factory "play game" button. 3 times MTV loaded this totally different Detective game instead. The fourth time I tried, it loaded "a page not found screen". The fifth time the whole thing crashed again.

Sound Factory sounds like a good game, but this is a terrible platform for it

This game is hilarious! And the best part is that I knew a guy who actually did something much like this in real life. He worked for a summer at some metal manufacturing plant; his job was using this machine to punch holes in metal plates. When the punched-out hole fell out onto the concrete floor it would make a note, and all the holes had slightly different tones. So by trial and error he eventually could play 'Carol of the Bells' just by dropping carefully selected circles of metal on the floor.

For those on level three that have a hard time completing the quota and getting all the instruments unlocked. It appears that if the appreciation gauge fills up while the previous instrument is still working its way onto the screen that a new instrument isn't unlocked. I tend to turn the tire pressure to low while a new instrument is coming on, and that slows the appreciation down enough so that when I turn the pressure back on, everything continues as it should and the new instrument is unlocked.

If you have any music education at all, you will find this game amazingly annoying, simply because the timing of the instruments is WAY off.

If you have everything playing just one note constant, NONE of them are together AT ALL.

After bearing listening to it for at least 30 seconds, I concluded it was because they are all dragging beat 4 of each measure, so it ends up sounding 5 4!!! This game, with its amazingly offbeat instruments is UNPLAYABLE because the output sound has NO BEAT WHATSOEVER.

Either hire musicians with rhythym, or fix the timing of the sound effects, MTV Arcade!!!

Hi Jared, thanks for the nice review - I was the sound designer on the project, and getting that choir of mice to behave when I was aiming the mic at them was no mean feat! Needed more cheese, obviously.

Just wanted to address the odd comment in the list - the loops and note ranges were drawn from one scale: C D E F G A B C, and thus it is perfectly possible to combine different notes to produce something that doesn't sound melodically 'correct' - indeed, playing B and C produces a dissonant sound - and we were mindful of this fact. We aimed to pitch the musical scope of the game on an intermediate level, where beginners could rely on loops, and use the mutiple note instruments sparingly, whereas more proficient musicians could exploit the latter instruments more fully, so I can see where some might run into trouble here. Other loops were composed using modes from the same scale, that, used over certain sequences would bring a completely different feel to a chord sequence(one loop from the oscilloscope can subvert an obtensibly major melody into a minor feel).

As for some timing issues, Flash is a tough nut to crack in terms of keeping stuff in sync, especially when there's as much going on as there is in The Sound Factory. Flash's performance can be drastically affected by the amount of apps you have running on your PC at the same time as playing the SWF. Rest assured that all the loops were composed in exact 4/4 time, though.

Anyway, hope these issues didn't too much affect anybody's enjoyment of it - have fun, all!

As much as I love this game, I only see one 'major' (insert the 'finger curling'...thingie) flaw-when I saw "music library", I had assumed that you were able to record what you did-and have other players listen. Not that mine is so great-but it would be awesome to listen to tunes others have made...guaranted some have made professional-grade stuff!

This game has changed my life. I am currently working in the field of robotics and sensors of various stripes (first magnetic sensing, now underwater robotics) but this game (and, to be fair, Electroplankton) have convinced me that my destiny lies in interactive music games. They are more rewarding than anything in the universe. I <3 this game.

I recall playing this back when it was shiny and new! The animation and concept and art and all is really great, though it doesn't sync nearly as well as I remembered it to, which kind of hurt my ears!

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